The dead girl lay beneath me. The pale yellow streetlamps shed just enough
light to let me see her feet and legs clearly. Black heels and flesh-colored
stockings faded into a dark form that curled into a fetal position. I wanted
to look away, but I was here to observe. I blew on my fingers to warm them
and began to take notes.

Finkel turned on his flashlight.

“This is aces,” he said.

She had sustained two bullet wounds, one in her forehead and the other in
her midsection. Purplish bruises circled her neck. She wore a dark blue
dress and a sleek, unbuttoned overcoat that I guessed was cashmere.

An open handbag lay a few feet from her body. Almost comically, her hat had
remained on her head.

It was the middle of November in 1946. The war had been over for more than a
year. With rationing at an end, people were buying whatever they could
afford, although I suspected I was looking at a Manhattan society girl who
was never denied anything.

She appeared to be in her twenties. The hair I could see was red, with
permed curls that fell to her shoulders. Her features were pretty but too
thin, as if she ate only half a meal a day. Her eyes were hazel and had the
troubled glaze of a tortured soul who was, at last, at peace.

A smooth line of blood tracked down the alley toward the street. I wondered
if I had stepped in it.

Finkel said he needed stuff from his car. This was gonna make a swell
pitcher. He gave me his flashlight and told me not to move anything until he
came back. Then he hurried away, threading through stacks of wooden crates
stacked ten feet over his head.

I was left alone with the colored man who had called the city desk not more
than fifteen minutes earlier. On the phone he said he was the night watchman
at a warehouse on East 45th. That put him in Blood Alley, a grimy stretch of
slaughterhouses, breweries and tenements wedged along the East River between
the affluent enclaves of Tudor City and Beekman Place.

The watchman had told me that he found a body while he was making his
rounds. He said he knew we liked to run pictures of that sort of thing. If
we steered a little money his way, he’d tell us exactly where she was.

I was a rewriteman who was supposed to stay in the office. But nothing else
was happening, so McCracken, the night editor, told me to take some petty
cash and head to the scene with Finkel. His pictures would make the story,
if there was one.

I hopped a bit from the cold as I wondered how such a proper-looking girl
could have ended up in this part of the city. I asked the colored man if he
had called the cops yet. He shook his head.

“What are you waiting for, Mr. --" I realized I didn’t have his name. I
shoved Finkel’s flashlight under my arm and tried to scratch some more
notes, but I could barely see the lines on the paper, much less what I was
writing.

“Anderson. William Anderson."

“You prefer William? No nickname?”

“They’re undignified. When a man loses his dignity, he’s no longer a man."
He paused, then smiled a bit. I saw a flash of a gold tooth. “We did talk
about some money before, didn’t we?”

I had grabbed a fistful of bills from a metal box inside the top drawer at
the desk where the copyboys sat. I had shoved the dough in my pants, but I
didn’t know how much I had or should offer.

I removed a crumpled greenback from my pocket. I used Finkel’s flashlight to
see what it was.

Twenty bucks.

“That’ll do,” Anderson said as he snatched the money.

I heard Finkel approaching. He was carrying a makeup kit, a pair of nylons
and a woman's hat. His camera was a Speed Graphic about half as big as he
was.

I asked what he was doing.

“My props,” he said. “They make my pitchers look good."

I told him I thought we should call the police.

“They’ll just louse it up." He pointed his stubby fingers toward the dead
girl. "Get rid of that," he said, gesturing toward her pillbox hat.

I said we shouldn’t disturb anything.

"You one of those by-the-book guys?” Finkel asked.

I said nothing. I’d never been to a crime scene before, but Finkel seemed to
live at them.

“Listen up, Grimes. Lemme tell you something about by-the-book guys in
newspapers." He paused, as if waiting for a drumroll. “At the end of the
week, that book gets ‘em fired."

William Anderson was smiling a bit, no doubt amused by the bickering white
men. “Let the man work,” he said to me.

Anderson removed the dead girl’s hat and tossed it behind a trashcan. I
pointed the flashlight toward her face while Finkel fluffed out the hat he'd
brought. He let it drop to the ground inches from her head. The wide-brimmed
job was bigger than the hat she'd been wearing, so it would show up better
in a photo. The picture itself would be more dramatic if the hat seemed to
have fallen from her body.

Finkel scattered the lipsticks near the open handbag, then looked over the
scene like an artist trying to figure out if his painting needed an extra
dash. Nodding, he bent down and unscrewed the caps of two of the lipsticks
and flicked them near her. Finally he took the nylons and slipped them
halfway into the handbag.

"Why are you doing that?" I asked.

"Every dame I ever met carries nylons in her bag."

The dead girl struck me as the type who could afford stockings that never
got torn. "I don't think she's like any dame you ever met," I said.

"Blow off, Grimes. I know how to make a good pitcher."

He spread his short legs (he was barely five feet tall), stood over her body
and pointed the camera straight down. I heard a popping sound, followed by a
flash that turned everything in front of me into blobs of purple and blue.
When my vision cleared, I saw Finkel crouching close to her head. His camera
stopped about a foot from her right ear. This time I covered my face with my
hands.

Finkel walked a few feet away from the body, sprawled himself on the ground
and pointed his Speed Graphic. The flash lit the night a third time. He
clambered on top of a tin trashcan and shot her again before walking behind
the body to take one more.

We all heard the sound at the same time: a faint wail that turned piercing
within seconds. Finkel let out the longest string of profanity I'd heard
since I got out of the Army. "Fucking cops,” he said. “They'll
take the nylons. And the lipsticks. They'll say they're
evidence, but they'll just give ’em to their girlfriends. "

He started shoving his stuff into his pockets. I pointed to the hat he had
placed near the girl’s body.

"What about that?" I asked.

"Shit! Oh shit!"

"Better take it with you."

"You're finally using your noodle, Grimes."

The noise from the siren bounced between the brick walls of the warehouses,
pushing everything out of my head except a desire for calm and quiet. Now it
was my turn to display the extent of my vocabulary. I covered my ears and
swore the way we all did when the German guns started up.

Finkel turned to Anderson and waved the hat around. “I’m in a jam,” he said.
“Where can I stash this?”

Anderson motioned for Finkel to follow. They headed toward the far end of
the alley. I began to go with them. Finkel gave me a sharp look of
disappointment.

"You are the stupidest goddamn rookie in the history of newspapers," Finkel
said. "You ain’t never covered a crime before, have you?"

McCracken had sent me out because I was the most expendable body in the
newsroom. I was still on probation. I'd never had a byline and didn't even
have a press tag.

“Go through her bag,” Finkel said. “Get an ID."

“But the cops -- "

“Don’t be afraid of the cops. Be afraid of McCracken. He’ll give
you the bum’s rush if you don’t know who that dame is when you get back to
the office."

Anderson led Finkel into the shadows. The siren stopped. I got on my knees,
turned the dead girl’s bag upright and plunged my hand into it, running
through her carry-around possessions: a brush, a comb, a small nail file.
Finally my fingers swept over something that felt like leather. I brought
out a purse that was six inches wide, which I slid inside my coat. I stood
up just as the high beam of a powerful light settled on my face.

I squinted deeply. Two dark forms that I assumed were cops stood near the
street.

“Hands up! Back away from her!”

I was alone in an alley in one of the worst parts of New York, standing over
a dead girl whose purse was in my possession. Finkel was right: I was the
stupidest goddamn rookie in the history of newspapers.